Dreamwork

Dreaming of graves, dreaming of death, is always uncomfortable. How could it not be? I’ve said yes to the life that comes in the night too many times to be fully ignorant.

There was a woman. We were in a ritual battle; agreed upon combat and the final knowing that she was to be buried. We both knew. My hands sifting rich black soil, mixing in herbs - very specific herbs. Mugwort. Rosemary. Passionflower. The soil is so black, so rich, so alive. My hands…I can feel the ecstasy of this life, the death in the life of this soil, the death this soil will usher, the decomposition. The woman lies down, surrendering to the way it must be. Overhead, grey clouds and a setting sun light up the forested eastern mountains.

I’m home, or what I used to call home, in Montana’s Gallatin Valley. I know these mountains and my heart cracks a little as I re-enter the dream, because I know something of imaginal gravesites. The woman - my friend, a wilderness-lover, a devotee of the American west, is giving herself back to the soil. I’m giving myself back to this soil. Of course. Of course I have to get in.

I’m tossing the soil now, this deep black wet crumbling perfect-for-growing dirt. I’m packing it around her body, I’m resisting. Of course I’m resisting. I’m jealous. What if she finds someone else, someone who hurt me long ago, someone I had on a pedestal as the way an outdoorsman is meant to be? I know I have to keep going, I have to let go. The soil is filling the sanctum, all that’s left is her face. I turn to an invisible guide - I recognize the guide, the Wind, the wind who shows up with me when I’m praying honestly, the breeze that moves the wind chimes that are all I have left of my grandma. I don’t see her, but I ask: “Should I cover the face?” I know that my friend will die if I cover her face. The wind shakes her head. No. My body relaxes. Don’t cover her face. I wake up.

The dream is still here. I went back and let my friends take me more deeply into it. Of course I had to get in the grave. I did. And I let go. I gave myself to the earth in the place I’ve loved more than any other. Among the ponderosas of the land where my grandparents built their lives and herded their sheep, just a few miles from the hospital where my father was born and then thirty four years later I was born, and then three more and one day, my brother, and 28 years after that where my grandfather took his last breath as we spoke the final word of the Lord’s Prayer huddled in a circle. I lay myself down here in these mountains.

Surrender always feels perfect. An embodiment of “finally.” Perhaps it’s utterly human to hold on to what we know deep down is dead. Or maybe there are people in the world who don’t. Anyway, I’m not one of them. So when I let go and the pine tree began to explode out of my mouth, as my chest ripped open and filled with the microbial truth, as my emptiness came clear and the transience of my life that felt so solid branched in evergreen exclamation toward the darkening sky, I smiled. Love is here. Love is always here.

The tree grew as our bodies decomposed. The trunk. I can’t stop looking at the trunk, the trunk that I am, eating our bodies. Child bodies. Adolescent bodies. Wandering bodies ignorant to the consequences of life. The trunk continuing to feed on the sacredness of dying in the woods. Dying is sacred and it’s small. How many deaths happen in the mountains each day, how many sentient waves dissolving back once more to particles? The mountain, my mountains, they noticed my death and they did not grieve. A sacred moment, onto the next. My death is so small.

The trunk stands gnarled and vast - bigger than any ponderosa I’ve seen. Twisted and solid, full of gravity and presence. And that presence is what I carry now, what I’m asked to carry now, the presence carried on the wind as all seeds are in some way or other, the ponderosa of the pinus family, the most successful and the oldest tree family on earth, covering every continent, standing through subarctic winters and tropical hurricanes alike. This ponderosa will stand and its seeds released from the edges of pinecones, scattered lavishly across the silent forest floor, will travel. I have traveled.

I have traveled and I’m finding ways to claim my death. Changing out the license plate. The driver’s license. The fuckery of taxes. Buerocratic stuff and governmental rituals. And new friends. And old edges of fear that cling to me like the rotten side of an otherwise good-looking avocado.

The truth is that I said yes to this dream, this death, a long time ago. A long time before the dream came, before I understood what it was to die in this way. It came when I said I wanted my own life, when I asked for truth. I didn’t know what I was asking for and I still don’t. But surrender feels good. It’s so much safer than it seems. My worst fears never come true. They just guard the entrance, loyal to the way of things, keeping me honest and testing my resolve.

I walk between worlds as much as I can, the must-do’s of waking life and the unflinching, unpitying crystalline accuracy of the night world, the underworld, the otherworld where the thread travels. All the blind corners, all the death.

Home. Am I home? My teacher says Home is always here, that home is inside. He doesn’t talk about the land, he doesn’t talk about the land where I was born and my grandpa died, where my parents will probably die and where I will not be, so much of that process (ugh, to call dying a “process”) will happen when I am not looking because I died and I got in the grave. My brother will see, and maybe he won’t because he’s there in the daily motion, where change is harder to see. But I see. I’ve been gone almost two years now and each time I go home I see. I don’t want to see. But I see. I have to see.

So many of us have left home. By some necessity or other, we do what we have to do. And we remake it. We carry a song or a windchime, a dinner recipe, a story, a posture, a way of listening or not. I’m restless because I remember something ancient at the edges of sleep in the forgotten moments of dreaming. I itch in a place I can’t scratch and I try to remember how I got here.

I got in the grave and a wide tree grew out of my mouth. A tree that requires my fidelity. The wind carried me and in her generosity didn’t cover my mouth, told me not to cover her mouth. So now I use my mouth. I breathe. I speak. I guess that's the way, the invitation, the directive. I guess that's what this death means. I wonder what these deep grown roots will find as they sift through the small bodies beneath them.